Oracle Blog

Walking the earth like Caine in Kung-Fu

Tuesday Jun 23, 2009

MD Nastran is a very high compute and I/O intensive application. Jobs can run for days and generate terabytes of data. Any processing or I/O optimization will help running more jobs concurrently and for shorter periods of time. From storage (Internal? Network Attached? SAS? HDD? SSD?) to memory (how much per node? per job?), the Sun BluePrints article "Sun Business Ready HPC for MD Nastran" provides interesting suggestions to help designing optimized configurations and avoiding processor or I/O bottlenecks. Detailed configuration examples and performance test results are provided.

Thursday Jun 18, 2009

The performance of some of the most popular High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications can be dramatically increased by simply swapping out drives. This is one of the findings by Larry McIntosh and Michael Burke, authors of the BluePrint "Solid State Drives in HPC: Reducing the I/O Bottleneck".

In one of the performance tests, by simply replacing the traditional 15K SAS Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) with SATA Solid State Drives (SSDs), the increase in productivity reached 54.42% (xxocmd2 and xlotdf1 NASTRAN benchmark tests running on 8 processing cores).

Similar tests are run with other HPC finite-element analysis applications such as ABAQUS or ANSYS as well as with the Lustre parallel file system (using IOZone) and they all demonstrated significant performance improvements.